Real Estate Secrets, Dangers and Dirty Tricks that Cost You Money. Exposed by 20 year Realtor and Author

Sarasota

A close friend stopped by our house and excitedly introduced us to PTK.

Better focus, energy, fat loss, mood and sleep were some of the benefits he was personally enjoying. Of course I want that, who doesn’t?

My Mistake: I thought it would be for people who wanted to lose fat and had extra money in their budget.

Wrong.

PTK – Pure Therapeutic Ketones were developed for elite US military forces to get them into a peak performance state within hours so they could quickly respond to missions. They weren’t trying to lose weight – they needed better focus and energy to perform at their best.

So this is for anyone who wants peak performance at work and in life.

Cost:

Pure Therapeutic Ketones are not cheap, although there are plenty of cheap knock offs on the market. Pruvit owns the patent to the real thing, and that is protected by law.

Two servings of PTK knocked out my cravings for sweets and chocolate.

Cha Ching. I’m now saving money on snacks.

Friends of ours are already saving on groceries and restaurants because cravings for expensive junk food are being eliminated. Folks are just rearranging their grocery budget and buying PTK instead of garbage.

Better health also leads to long term cost benefits.

Good health is an investment, not an expense.

Of course there is an income opportunity here. But you can also get your PTK at a discount, or even free, just as a customer.

Watch this 3 minute video to learn more about ketones and ketosis. As more research comes out, this is becoming more and more popular. PTK allows us to jump start ketosis and begin reaping the benefits weeks before we would see results just by changing our eating habits.

No one has said this to me yet, but I suspect cigarettes could also be a cost savings. Everyone knows ex-smokers tend to gain weight. Eliminating the downside of quitting and improving health and finances could be a benefit to those who want to quit without the weight gain.

Watch this 3 minute video and let me know what you like best about it.

The ad was captivating. It grabbed your attention and pulled you in, but don’t fall for it.

There are several reasons people go to Zillow, but here is proof that you shouldn’t make any important decisions based on what you find there.

Buyers are looking for homes

Sellers are confirming the value for a list price

Buyers are confirming the value before making an offer

Folks are “checking out” a potential real estate agent

Pictures, maps, neighborhood info

The dirty low down:

Number 5 is easy: Zillow harvests photos and data from numerous sources and provides it for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy it. Even if the photos are not current, you aren’t going to make too big of a mistake just from looking at them.

Number 1 is also easy: Not everything you see on Zillow is actually available for sale. There are dozens of reasons why properties are shown when they aren’t for sale. This company exists solely to lure viewers and collect information to sell to real estate agents. The data doesn’t have to be accurate; it just has to be attractive.

Number 4 can be a real problem. It’s a problem for the buyers and sellers, and also for the real estate agents. I sell two or three times as much real estate as the average agent, but you can’t tell that from looking at Zillow. They say that I have not sold anything in the last 17 months. https://jimsweat.wordpress.com/2018/09/20/really-zillow-again/

Yes, I can go in and manually update it, but that doesn’t mean it will be accurate next week. Here today, gone tomorrow is reality with these guys.

They were happy to use my photos, my descriptions and marketing remarks on my listings they used as “bait” to attract potential buyer and seller leads, but when those homes sold, Zillow conveniently “forgot” to credit me with the sale.

Blog post January 16, 2015 titled Real Estate Misinformation and Extortion tells how after 20 years in real estate, Zillow showed me completing 2 (two) total transactions. Two. After I had been a full time licensed real estate professional for twenty years! I had owned a real estate company part of that time. I had obtained my ABR, CRS, GRI, CDPE, e-PRO and ILHM designations – many of which require a certain level of production to qualify. But the big gorilla of real estate information credited me with two sales!

My blog post Boom! Yes That Was My Head Exploding! from August 6, 2015 tells when I found out Trulia and Zillow wiped my slate, again. After over 20 years as a full-time licensed real estate professional, part of which I was broker/owner of a real estate company, Trulia credited me with 1 (one) total career sale and Zillow showed me having 2 (two) sales in my entire career!

You don’t have to make things up, they prove every day that danger lurks if you blindly follow.

The thing to remember is that Zillow exists purely to make money from real estate brokers. If they have decent information on the website, great. If not, it doesn’t matter as long as they can lure people there, collect the contact info, and sell them to an agent.

There are thousands of companies that do the same thing: provide real estate information for the sole purpose of collecting leads to sell to real estate agents. Zillow just happens to be the biggest, and therefore can do the most damage.

Zillow has some great ads: A wonderful mix of emotional heart-tugs and perceived factual data.

Too bad people make important life decisions based on the fake news and false information.

Do not make any major decisions based on an online, automated home valuation. You could lose a lot of money. A lot.

How does a $60,000 loss on a $300,000 home sound to you? Ridiculous? Read on.

Of course you are going to look up the value before you make an offer on a home, or prior to selling your current place. Just remember, that number is almost guaranteed to be wrong.

If you make life-changing decisions based on bad information, then you’re jeopardizing your future.

How can I be so sure the information you get online isn’t correct? Because it is statistically unlikely, and most of the sites will even tell you so, in the fine print.

Does it matter which site you use? Not really. Some are better at guessing than others, but they all vary dramatically.

When determining value on a property I typically check ten different online valuation sites. Not because I think they “know” what the home is worth, but because the seller and potential buyers are checking these sites, and it’s better to know in advance what disinformation they are consuming.

Those values are all over the map!

For example, a home with a true market value of $300,000 might have automated valuations ranging from 225,000 to 375,000. That is a large margin of error!

What about the infamous Zillow Zestimate? This is the margin of error stated on their website as of July 26, 2018:

Nationwide, Zestimates are currently within 5% of the final sale price 52.9% of the time.

In the U.S. as a whole, Zestimates are currently within 10% of the final sale price 73.3% of the time.

Nationally, Zestimates are currently within 20% of the final sale price 85.8% of the time.

Let’s put this into real world numbers using the $300k actual value example.

Just over half of the time (52.9%) the Zestimate is within $15,000 (5%) of actual final sales price. That could be high or low, so a $30,000 swing from 285,000 to 315,000.

The Zestimate is within 10% on another 20.4% of homes. That means a $60,000 swing from 270,000 to 330,000. If the buyer believes the real value is 270,000 and the seller thinks it is 330,000… well it’s easy to see we now have a significant problem.

Another 12.5% of homes are within 20%. That produces a $120,000 range of value from 240,000 to 360,000! That is 40% of the actual value! You don’t want to make any decisions based on this information!

Zillow admits they are not even within 20% (high or low) on 14.2% of homes nationally.

Do you want to guess which group your Zestimate falls within? It’s a roll of the dice!

If you’re in the 52.9% group you could lose $15,000.

If you’re in the 20.4% group you could lose $30,000.

If you’re in the 12.5% group you could lose $60,000.

If you’re in the 14.2% group you could lose even more than that!

The last two groups comprise 26.7% of properties. That means you have a greater than 1 in 4 chance oflosing $60,000 or more if you base your buying or selling decision on the information you obtained from the big gorilla of real estate data online.

This is a multi-billion dollar company that draws millions of people to the website each and every month. And I have the nerve to warn you against believing what you see in black and white on that website? Yes. That website and dozens of others. Pay attention.

The actual Zestimate, not the range of possibility, the actual published number on my personal residence has gone up and down over the last year $59,000. That is absurd. Home values don’t rise and fall with the wind, like the stock market.

Side note: Facebook stock is down 20% today. Your home doesn’t go on a roller coaster ride every month.

These robot valuations use raw sales data available from public records but they have a huge disadvantage: They have never been inside your home.

They don’t know if the flooring, kitchen cabinets and roof all need replaced, or if they were just completely updated. They can’t see the view; they don’t know if the comparative sales were well cared for or not; they can’t tell if the home next door is an eyesore or worse; they can’t hear the traffic from the highway that decreased the selling price on three of the comparable sales they are using.

The bottom line is you need a trustworthy professional to give you good information.

Contact a full-time, experienced and knowledgeable professional whom you trust to give you good advice so you can make the best decision for your family.

Two questions need to be answered when multiple offers, bidding wars, tight inventory, and Realtors buying properties become the norm.

We have been seeing strong demand and rising prices for the last three years. The real estate market in Southwest Florida was decimated during the real estate crash, so it is not only reasonable, but also smart, to be alert for signs of danger. Values dropped by over fifty percent from the boom prices of 2005 to the depths of despair in 2011.

Many have been asking if the bidding wars we are seeing are leading to another bubble. Multiple offers are a sign of strong demand, which we definitely have.

There is one irrefutable sign when prices are not sustainable. I will get to that in a moment, first you need to know the two most important questions to ask:

Who?

Why?

Who is buying real estate, and why are they buying it? If you pay attention to the answers, you will have a good grasp on the overall health of the real estate market.

During an eight month period of 2014, over half of the agents in my office bought real estate. Now, we have a small office, still you had six agents buy property in a short period of time. Is that a warning sign?

It could be. The first wave of foreclosures during the crash was heavily populated with agent owned properties. I cover that in more depth in my upcoming book, Real Estate CSI: Controversy, Secrets, Insight.A real estate agent exposes dangers and dirty tricks that cost you money.

The second question determines if that is cause for alarm. Why? Answer: We all bought real estate to own it. None of those purchases was for a flip, or an attempt to get into the chain of title for profit. We all wanted to own the properties we bought.

That is a strong indicator of healthy market growth ahead.

During the boom, everyone was buying real estate. Anyone who could fog a mirror was clamoring to grab the next property available, and many times contracts were selling multiple times before the first closing even took place. Properties weren’t even changing hands. Just the contract to purchase was being sold at a profit to someone else.

Who? Everyone.

Why? For fast money. They didn’t want to own the property; they only wanted to get their name on a contract that could be sold tomorrow for more money.

The most important sign among the many:

When “everyone” is buying, but few actually want to own it, that is a bad sign.

So who is buying real estate today, besides half of our office? Baby boomers; early retirees; investors; snowbirds; first time buyers; move up buyers; people who love Florida and want to enjoy it for more than a couple of weeks a year; and the occasional flipper.

These are good people to see spending their money in the marketplace, and a sign that bodes well for the future.

How secure is it to purchase a high-end home in this southwest Florida area? Let’s take a quick look at two of our local islands, and then the numbers for each county.

In the last 12 months, there have been 25 closed sales on Casey Key. All but three of them were for over a million dollars. The average sale price was $2.62M, the median was over $2M.

Fifty three single family homes, on Siesta Key, over $1M, on the waterfront sold in the last 12 months (more than one per week). Average sale price was almost $2.6M; with the median at $1.8M.

When I expand the criteria to all sales on Siesta Key for $1M or more, there are six with accepted offers, averaging almost $2.4M asking price; seven are pending with average list price of $2.15M; and 78 sales have closed, with an average selling price of $2.25M. That is 1.5 sales per week, pretty strong demand for million dollar homes on just one barrier island in Sarasota County!

When I proceed to pull the statistics for all of Sarasota County, it confirms that there is a robust market in the $1M and up price range.

Thirty one homes are active with contract (accepted offers in place) with an average list price of $1.72M. Seventy five homes are pending, with an average list price over $2.3M.

395 homes have sold for over a million dollars in the last 365 days in Sarasota County! More than one per day, with an average sales price over $1.9M. The average days on market is 183 in this price range, so it may be a stretch to call it “brisk”, but 395 closed sales is certainly proof of a strong and healthy demand for high end homes in the Sarasota area!

Manatee County has five homes AWC – active with contract, averaging $1.8M; eighteen are pending, averaging $1.74M; one hundred twenty three (123) homes have sold averaging over $1.5M.

Charlotte County is smaller and has six high end homes with accepted offers (AWC) that average $1.59M; ten are pending sales averaging $1.64M; twenty homes have sold with an average sales price of $1.57M.

Total sales for million dollar homes in the Tri-county region are 538; average is almost 1.5 sales per day. So, how secure should someone feel about buying a high end home in Sarasota County, Manatee County, or Charlotte County?

Five hundred thirty eight sales indicate a lot of millionaires are interested enough in our area to put some serious money into real estate here.

Here are some additional things to think about.

Even though the experts were wrong about how quickly interest rates would go up, they will eventually rise beyond the historic lows we have been enjoying. A boost to our area is that property values have been increasing in most of the country, and that will allow many folks who were waiting to regain their equity, to sell up north and move to Florida.

Thousands of baby boomers retire every day, and many of them have spent their entire lives dreaming about owning a home in Florida so they can escape the cold that makes their bones ache!

It isn’t just homes that are selling. When you follow the money, you end up in the Tri-county region.

Last month, Publix paid more than $17 million dollars for the shopping center at University Parkway and Market Street in Lakewood Ranch. In the past year, it also acquired centers in Sarasota, Parrish, Englewood and Port Charlotte.

Publix is just one company that is expanding in the region. A lot of big names are investing heavily in SW Florida. The UTC Mall is the only mall that opened in all of the US last year. Many other big names have either just come to the area, or expanded in the last few years. I am working on an updated list of businesses that have opened commercial locations recently.

I feel good confirming that there is such an active high end residential market, on top of the massive investment regional and national companies are making in our area. This all bodes well for the future, and proves that a lot of smart money is flowing directly into the Sarasota County region.

Follow the money, it leads to Sarasota!

Sales data compiled from the My Florida Regional Multiple Listing System for 3-18-2014 to 3-18-2015.